El Negro de Banyoles tugged the hemof his orange loincloth to save Europefrom shame. Storm clouds darkened the gallery skylights. Bruegel’s blind man led a parade of blind men into a ditch as a student sketched a copy at her easel. After the war, Vietnamese beat cradles, tools,and kettles from spent artillery shells.We might define…
Yep. She fell running across the open space.It wasn’t her fault. It’s just One more thing that happened. Knee bleeding,She wouldn’t get picked for the team. None of us understood, of course.We stood there, looking and looking. I’ve read that in this earth we bring forth windAs if soughing, that we are not our own…
Near the end of the course, in that part of the hourReserved for questions, a silence fell on the classWhen the girl who’d been quiet all semesterRaised her hand to ask if anyone there besides herBelieved in heaven. An embarrassed silenceWhile each of us wondered why she hadn’t chosenTo go to the Bible college just…
I am the only man in the worldbecause I have no tits. I havea permanent hard-on as long as I am tall and itoutweighs me. They say that Ihave horns, hooves, and a tail, but thisis a myth or a lie: my foreheadis knobbed, my coccyx is protuberant,and my toes are flanged. Mostpeople run away when I…
You wander into my thought,my happiness, the way the deerwander through the yard these days, very relaxed, with no thought of being hunted,browsing the bushes near the drivewaylike people at the refreshment table of an art opening… That’s how you come over me—not with a burst of wings,but with that slow, presumptuous air of entitlement,as…
Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex- boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn, romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line waving paper…
I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb,like God snapping his fingers in my face:Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running aroundhalf-naked, with the rest of America,wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf.Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’sgoing-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,but all I saw were the sad…
Before they put Cousin Gladys inside the ground in a cornrow of fair-skinned Creole men, I sat in her funeral mass imagining two shadows dancing in the swish of a swift moving blade that slit her dreams in halfand sent her father strollingacross the cane field like a land-bending river, turning a page she could…
Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was notspeaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burstbetween his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slapthe table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see. I never…
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